Sesklo

This settlement gives its name to the first Neolithic culture of Europe, which inhabited Thessaly and parts of Macedonia. The oldest fragments researched at Sesklo place the civilisation's development as far back as 6850 BC.

The first settlements, which predate the 6th millennium BCE, are known as proto-Sesklo and pre-Sesklo and they show an advanced agriculture and a very early use of pottery that rivals in age those of the Near East, in an area geographically close to the Petralona cave and the Archanthropus living environment.

The peoples of Sesklo built their villages on hillsides near fertile valleys, where they grew wheat and barley, also keeping herds of mainly sheep and goats, though they also had cows, pigs and dogs. Their houses were small, with one or two rooms, built of wood or mudbrick in the early period. Later the construction technique becomes more homogeneous and all homes are built of adobe with stone foundations. In the 6th millennium BCE, the first houses with two levels are found and there is also a clear intentional urbanism.

Discovered

The birthstone of May is the emerald, a beautiful green gem that has been revered for thousands of years. Egyptian Queen Cleopatra was a great admirer of emeralds; in fact her own mine was rediscovered about a century ago – one of the earliest confirmations of emeralds in history.

KV 63

That no mummies were found in KV 63 — the first tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings in nearly 84 years — was neither disappointing nor entirely surprising to those who unearthed the tomb and painstakingly worked to preserve all that they found inside.

"We found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mummies, but we never discovered something like this," said Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief Egyptologist, as he peered at the contents. "Look at what we discovered here. Look at it."

Archaeology is about patience, and about expecting the unexpected. It is about finding a clue in the sand and gently sifting through layers of time. KV 63 has offered up many mysteries. Seven coffins were found inside, and each was filled with items like pillows, linens and broken pottery.

But archaeology is also about show business, and in modern Egypt the master of ceremonies, the only man allowed to pull back the curtain for the audience, is Dr. Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. He has a theory about KV 63, but by the end of the day on Wednesday it was hard to know how much of that was show business and how much science, or whether there was a bit of both.

Gardens

Though the story went that Babylonia's King Nebuchadnezzar constructed the gardens to appease his homesick wife, Dalley asserts that it was instead Assyria's King Sennacherib behind them. Using her expertise in the region's ancient language, Dalley translated a number of Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman texts, and found what the Independent describes as "four key pieces of evidence." Among them: indications that Nineveh may have been seen as a "new Babylon" after the Assyrians conquered the Babylonians in 689 BC, studies of the topography near the respective locations, and signs that the historians who wrote about the gardens a few centuries later actually visited locations near Nineveh. The Guardianalso reports that, by Dalley's translation, a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that had been woefully deciphered about a century ago revealed Nineveh was home to an intricate system of waterways that would have transported water 50 miles to the gardens. Recent digs have uncovered signs these aqueducts existed, notes the Guardian, which says the dangerous nature of the area has prevented much exploration of it.

Spheres

Archaeologists have come across a number of strange spheres below an ancient pyramid in Teotihuacan.

The team had been using a special robot with cameras mounted on it to explore previously uncharted tunnels and chambers below the Temple of the Feathered Serpent when they discovered a number of peculiar spheres. Ranging in size from 4 to 12 inches in diameter, the spheres have a clay core surrounded by the mineral pyrite which gives them a yellowish color.

It is believed that the spheres would have remained untouched and undiscovered since being sealed away in the chambers up to 1,800 years ago. "We believe that high-ranking people, priests or even rulers, went down to the tunnel to perform rituals," said archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez. "Maybe in this place, we will find the remains of those who ruled Teotihuacan."